Jeremy Thorpe - obituary - Telegraph Obituaries Jeremy Thorpe - obituary Jeremy Thorpe was a charismatic leader of the Liberal Party who fell from grace in one of the most spectacular political scandals of the 20th century Thorpe outside the House of Commons after being elected the new leader of the Liberal Party in 1967 Photo: GETTY/HULTONARCHIVE 6:02PM GMT 04 Dec 2014 Comments Jeremy Thorpe, the former leader of the Liberal Party who has died aged 85, suffered a fall unparalleled in British political history when a long-drawn-out chain of scandal dragged him into the dock at the Old Bailey, charged with conspiracy and incitement to murder. For once the cliché “trial of the century” did not seem misplaced. Thorpe had been a sparkling and successful politician who had come tantalisingly close to realising the Liberals’ dream of holding the balance of power.

In 1974, indeed, he was invited by the prime minister, Edward Heath — whom he had once described as “a plum pudding around whom no one knew how to light the brandy” — to lead his party into coalition with the Conservatives; he himself was offered the post of foreign secretary. It was understandable, therefore, that five years later, at Thorpe’s trial, even prosecuting counsel should have spoken of a “tragedy of truly Greek and Shakespearean proportions”. Tragedy, however, is a large word, implying the destruction, if not necessarily of virtue, at least of some outstanding merit. Only in the context of a man’s entire life can its just application be decided. John Jeremy Thorpe was born on April 29 1929 into a highly political family. He would claim descent from Sir Robert de Thorpe, who was Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in 1356 and Chancellor in 1371. More to the point, both of Thorpe’s parents were staunch Conservatives. His father John Thorpe, born in Cork, was a KC and, for a few years after the First World War, MP for Rusholme in Manchester.

His mother was the daughter of Sir John Norton-Griffiths, 1st Bt, another Conservative MP and one who gloried in the epithet “Empire Jack” — even if he owed his baronetcy to Lloyd George. Related Articles Jeremy Thorpe scandal: New claims over plot to murder Norman Scott 07 Dec 2014 Jeremy Thorpe, however, thought of himself as “three-quarters Celt”; and in keeping with this bias, it was from his mother’s friend Lady Megan Lloyd George that, rather to Mrs Thorpe’s disapproval, he imbibed a romantic attachment to Liberalism. The boy had two sisters, both older; he was brought up as the cynosure of his parents’ eyes. “It never occurred to him,” his mother remarked of his early days in Kensington, “that anybody might not be glad to see him.” Young Jeremy adored his father, but it was his mother who exerted the most powerful influence. A formidable woman, who affected an eyeglass, Ursula Thorpe nursed the highest ambitions for her son. “That monocle!” Thorpe recalled in later life. “We were all frightened of her.

I have overcome the domination, and I am damn well not going to be dominated again.” Thorpe was only six when tubercular glands were diagnosed in his stomach. For seven months he had to lie on his back in a spinal carriage; he suffered back pains for the rest of his life. The Second World War caused a hiatus in what promised to be a conventional English education. In 1940 Thorpe and the younger of his sisters were sent to stay with an aunt in America, where he attended the Rectory School in Connecticut, by contemporary English standards a decidedly easy-going establishment. Thorpe loved it. His histrionic gifts — and in particular his talent for mimicry — began to flourish. He played Miranda in The Tempest, became an accomplished violinist, and showed precocious assurance as a public speaker. In 1943 he returned to England to go to Eton, where the more rigorous discipline proved less agreeable. He was also greatly upset by the death of his father, after a stroke, in 1944. This misfortune left the family in dire financial straits, so that an uncle had to stump up the funds to keep the boy at Eton.

It also, inevitably, increased the sway of Mrs Thorpe. After Eton, Thorpe joined the Rifle Brigade for his National Service, only to be invalided out of the Army after six weeks as “psychologically unsuitable”. It has been alleged that he became a bed-wetter to prove the point. At Trinity College, Oxford, by contrast, the military reject flourished outrageously. His flamboyant dress — frock coats, stove-pipe trousers, brocade waistcoats, buckled shoes, and even spats — received all the attention they demanded; his penchant for Chinese vases suggested aesthetic sensibility; his witty persiflage kept the mockers at a distance. Theoretically, Thorpe was reading Law; in reality he was laying the foundations of his political career. But though he became in turn president of the Liberal Club, the Law Society and the Union, he attracted criticism from contemporaries for the ruthlessness he showed in the pursuit of these offices. Thorpe scraped a Third in his Finals. Afterwards, in 1954, he was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple, and built up a modest practice on the Western Circuit.

He also, later in the 1950s, worked for commercial television, appearing regularly on current affairs programmes such as This Week, and sending back reports from Africa and the Middle East. But politics was always his master passion. In 1952, with the help of Dingle Foot, whom he had befriended when at Oxford, he was adopted as Liberal candidate at North Devon which, though it had been a Liberal seat in the early 1930s, had a 12,000 Tory majority in the 1951 General Election. Thorpe, at his very best on the stump, had no rival as a vote-gatherer. He could put any argument with skill and panache; his astonishing memory for faces persuaded voters that they were intimate friends; his brilliant gifts as a mimic kept the audience in stitches; his resourceful mind afforded quips and stunts for every occasion. At the same time he built up a formidable organisation in the constituency, and drove it with unflagging energy. In the 1955 general election the Tory majority was slashed to 5,226, and four years later he captured the seat by 362 votes.

Thorpe would hold North Devon for 20 years, narrowly at first, but in February 1974 with a thumping 11,082 majority. Yet he was never tempted to appeal to wavering Tory voters by trimming his Liberal views on issues such as South Africa or capital punishment. In the House of Commons he made an immediate impression. A sketch-writer remarked of his maiden speech that “it seemed as though Mr Thorpe had been addressing the House for the past 10 years, and got rather tired of the exercise”. But the young MP knew how to draw blood, as with his jibe after Harold Macmillan sacked several of his Cabinet in 1962: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his own life.” Thorpe appeared somewhat to the Left of the party, a mouthpiece for impeccable Liberal sentiments, especially on African affairs. He received the distinction of being banned from Franco’s Spain. In 1966 he advocated that Britain should cut off the oil supplies to Ian Smith’s Rhodesian regime by bombing that country’s railway system.

The Liberal conference enthusiastically applauded the idea, but Harold Wilson inflicted permanent damage by coining the phrase “Bomber Thorpe”. Thorpe flanked by Edward Heath and Harold Wilson at Westminster Abbey in 1970 (HULTON ARCHIVE) Meanwhile, though, the young MP had been working energetically to fill the organisational void left by Jo Grimond’s leadership. Thorpe’s charm made him especially effective as a fund-raiser, and in 1965 he captured the party treasuryship. When Grimond retired in 1967, the 12 Liberal MPs elected Thorpe in his place. The new leader immediately gave a foretaste of his style by holding a rally in the Albert Hall, at which he promised “a great crusade that will set Britain alight for the vision of a Liberal society” — a performance relayed by closed circuit television to three other city centres. Nevertheless, in his first years at the helm the showman for once misjudged his act. “He felt he had to move away from the image of the sharp and witty debater to being grave,” David Steel remembered. “It was disastrous.” Yet Thorpe did not altogether abandon frivolity.

Colleagues found, to their frustration and fury, that important policy discussions had to wait upon the leader’s gossipy anecdotes about the prime minister or royalty. Nor did Thorpe’s continuing addiction to outmoded dress and eccentric headgear — notably the brown bowler hat he wore when electioneering — do anything to allay the growing suspicion that he was all style and precious little substance. His critics acknowledged that he loved the game of politics — indeed he took a fiendish delight in its Machiavellian plots and manoeuvres — but they wondered if he knew why he was playing it. Thorpe’s Liberalism was essentially romantic and emotional. He reacted strongly against bone-headed Establishment snobbery, arrogant management or racial injustice, but showed scant interest in formulating any coherent political philosphy. On the other hand there was no doubting Thorpe’s quick mind or his keen antennae. He was to the fore in predicting the 1967 devaluation crisis and in identifying the mounting crisis in Ulster; he also showed himself a consistent supporter of Britain’s entry into the Common Market. Thorpe did not suffer fools gladly.

Erring subordinates were treated to the sharp rebuke or the snappish aside; and in the face of any challenge to his authority the mask of the jester quickly gave way to a fixed, distant and icy stare. He was at his most formidable under pressure, as the Young Liberals discovered when they attempted to mount a coup in 1968. The unsatisfactory opening years of his leadership culminated in the 1970 general election. Thorpe campaigned with his accustomed zeal, sweeping about the country in helicopters and cutting an impressive figure on television, but the results were disastrous. The Liberals polled only 2.1 million votes and retained only six seats. And then, less than a fortnight after the election, Thorpe’s wife Caroline was killed in a car crash. For a while Thorpe appeared to lose interest in politics. But in 1972 and 1973 the widespread dissatisfaction with the Heath government found expression in a remarkable series of Liberal successes in municipal and by-elections. Thorpe’s style was undoubtedly a factor in attracting discontented Tory voters.

But his animadversions against the “bloody-mindedness” of British life were undermined, at the end of 1973, by his involvement in a shoddy financial disaster. Thorpe had become a director of Gerald Caplan’s London & County Securities to boost his meagre parliamentary salary; in his delight at the sudden flush of income, however, he failed to heed numerous and reiterated warnings about the company’s viability. In 1972 the Liberals, and Thorpe himself, put on a notable display of piety over Reginald Maudling’s involvement with the Poulson affair. It was therefore more than a shade embarrassing when it transpired that the leader was involved in a company that was charging 280 per cent on second mortgages, and when, at the end of 1973, the collapse of London & County revealed a tangled skein of financial misdemeanour. British voters, far from being concerned, were apparently impressed by Liberal promises to tackle the national crisis with increased public spending and state control of incomes. At the February 1974 general election Thorpe, though largely confined in his marginal North Devon constituency, reached his political apotheosis.

The Liberals nearly trebled their vote to six million; the only fly in the ointment was that this total translated itself into but 14 seats. Rumour had it that Thorpe was responsive to Heath’s offer of a coalition, with the promise of a Speaker’s conference to consider electoral reform. His colleagues, however, have gone on record that the decision to reject these terms was “unanimous”. The ensuing months exposed the flaws in the Liberal revival. The party activists were radicals; many of its new-found supporters were dissatisfied Tories. Moreover, the exquisite Thorpe seemed far removed from the community politics advocated by Trevor Jones (“Jones the Vote”) and his chums. In the October 1974 general election, the Liberal leader left his North Devon constituency to its own devices and once more whisked about the country in helicopters and hovercraft. All to no avail: the Liberal vote fell by 700,000. Thorpe was severely disillusioned.

But the most remarkable thing about his political career was not that he ultimately failed to storm the heights, but that he managed to retain the sang-froid to lead the Liberals when, all the while, a large part of his energies was concentrated on repressing a significant element of his personality. That Thorpe, in his youth, had homosexual tendencies was admitted at his trial. Nor was it in dispute — though he always emphatically denied any physical relationship — that in 1961 he had befriended a young man named Norman Josiffe, who later changed his name to Norman Scott. Though Mr Justice Cantley’s conduct of the trial was widely criticised, no one argued about his description of Norman Scott. “He is a fraud. He is a sponger. He is a whiner. He is a parasite.” Scott claimed to have had an affair with Thorpe between 1961 and 1964, and there can be no question whatever that, as their meetings dwindled and finally ceased, he conceived a grievance that nothing but the ruin of Thorpe could assuage.

(It should be remembered that homosexual acts between consenting adults were not legalised until 1967.) In pursuit of his vendetta Scott seized every possible occasion, public and private, to advertise his sexual connection with Thorpe. As early as December 1962 he blurted out the story to the Chelsea police, and gave them two letters he had received from the MP, one of which contained the phrase — “Bunnies can (and will) go to France” — that would become notorious when, 14 years later, it finally reached the public domain. During that time Scott bore the menace of a time-bomb ticking away in the shadows of Thorpe’s career. The fuse was unpredictable, but intermittent splutters constantly portended some vast explosion. Thus in 1965 Scott took it upon himself to write to Thorpe’s mother setting out the details of his homosexual relations with her son. This missive prompted Thorpe to make the cardinal error of confiding in Peter Bessell, a fellow Liberal MP.

Thorpe in his office at the Houses of Parliament, 1970 (GETTY) One of the most striking features of the affair was that Thorpe, for all his public glamour, seemed to have no upright friend to whom he was prepared to turn for counsel. Bessell was a Methodist lay preacher; he was also, as he himself would all too willingly confirm under cross-examination, amoral, hypocritical and untruthful. Bessell tried to contain the danger to Thorpe by going to see Scott, by purloining compromising letters, and subsequently by paying Scott small weekly sums which Thorpe refunded. He also sought, and appeared to receive, assurances from the home secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, that the police were not interested in pursuing Scott’s allegations. But Thorpe’s anxiety could not be assuaged as long as the possibility remained that Scott would one day succeed in finding a newspaper to print his story. And after the Liberal leader had married Caroline Allpass in 1968, he had even more to lose — though the best man, David Holmes, wrote that Caroline Thorpe “knew about Scott” before they were married.

In May 1969 Scott himself married; and his son was born that November. The marriage soon broke up, but not before the experience of connubial penury in a Dorset cottage had lent a hysterical edge to Scott’s importuning of Bessell. Worse, there was the threat — never, in fact, realised — that Scott would use the divorce proceedings as an opportunity to blurt out his accusations about Thorpe under the protection of court privilege. Another crisis developed in 1971. Scott, now living in North Wales, became the lover of a widow, Mrs Gwen Parry-Jones, who, treated to the usual accounts of Thorpe’s iniquities, duly reported them to another Liberal MP, Emlyn Hooson. A Liberal Party inquiry into the affair ensued. Thorpe fought like a tiger, denying the allegations point blank and enlisting the help of the home secretary, Reginald Maudling, to confirm a somewhat misleading summary of police dealings with Scott. It was Thorpe’s word against that of his tormentor, and the Liberals chose to believe their leader.

Next year, 1972, Mrs Parry-Jones died, and at the inquest on her death Scott at last had the opportunity to tell his story in court. But no editor cared to print his wild ravings; nor did a South African journalist, Gordon Winter, find any takers when he gathered material from Scott. It might have seemed that Scott had done his worst, and been repelled. In 1973 Thorpe announced his engagement to Marion, Countess of Harewood, previously married to the Queen’s cousin. About the same time Scott moved to Thorpe’s North Devon constituency, where he proceeded to inflict the history of his relations with the local MP upon bemused rustics in pubs. He also told his tale to the Tory candidate, who decided not to touch it. Just before the first general election of 1974, David Holmes succeeded in purchasing some letters from Scott for £2,500. Nevertheless, Scott the persecutor now appeared in the role of victim. In February 1975 he was beaten up by two men in Barnstaple market.

And in October, when an AA patrolman discovered him weeping beside the corpse of his great dane, Rinka, he claimed that only a jammed pistol had prevented the assailant from shooting him as well as the dog. In January 1976 Scott, charged with defrauding the DHSS, declared under the privilege of court that he was being “hounded by people” because of his affair with Jeremy Thorpe. This time, at last, the press did take notice. Thereafter rumour blew so loud that by March Thorpe felt compelled to defend himself in The Sunday Times, specifically denying both that he had hired a gunman to kill Scott, and that he had had any knowledge of Holmes’s purchase of the letters in 1974. Despite support from the prime minister, Harold Wilson, who appeared to believe that the accusations had been fabricated by the South African secret service, Thorpe was unable to hold the line. After the “Bunnies” letter was published in The Sunday Times in May 1976, he resigned the Liberal leadership.

Thorpe leaving the Liberal Club in 1977 (REX FEATURES) There could scarcely have been any criminal charges against him, however, if Bessell, who had long been exiled in California, had not decided to turn Queen’s evidence. He believed, with good reason, that Thorpe would not hesitate to throw him to the wolves in order to save his own skin. Bessell alleged that in 1968 and 1969 Thorpe had incited Holmes and himself to murder Scott, helpfully suggesting that the body might be chucked down a Cornish mine shaft, or cemented into a motorway bridge. “It’s no worse than killing a sick dog,” Thorpe is supposed to have remarked, before recommending research into slow-acting poisons. The second charge associated Thorpe with Holmes and two others on a charge of conspiracy to murder in the years 1974 and 1975; this also depended partly on Bessell’s evidence, though in this case the diversion of Liberal funds through Holmes’s hands to the hitman, Andrew Newton, was also germane.

Thorpe behaved with marked courage in the face of the cataclysm, observing with his accustomed brio that a man who had the prime minister, Lord Goodman and MI5 on his side could hardly lose. Even after his committal to trial at the Old Bailey Thorpe insisted on contesting North Devon at the 1979 election, where his opponents included Auberon Waugh, standing for the Dog Lovers’ Party. Though Thorpe lost the seat (he remarked laconically to a television interviewer that Scott’s allegations had “hardly helped” his campaign), his vote fell by less than 5,000 compared with October 1974. Norman Scott in 1979 (PA) At the Old Bailey the charges failed after the defence, with the help of Mr Justice Cantley, had annihilated Bessell’s character. Thorpe opted not to give evidence in his own defence, thus avoiding cross-examination. Even so, his reputation was badly damaged by the exhibition of the financial sleight of hand which he had shown in directing funds given to the Liberal Party by the millionaire “Union Jack” Hayward towards David Holmes.

He was also revealed as a blustering bully in his attempt to dissuade his friend Nadir Dinshaw, the Pakistani financier, from telling the truth. Dinshaw, acting on Thorpe’s command, had innocently passed on money to Holmes. Before the trial Thorpe told him that if he reported the fact, “It will be curtains for me, and you will be asked to move on.” In short, the trial bore out the impression created by Thorpe’s political career, that he was essentially a fixer and an operator. Far from being a tragic hero — a noble nature ruined by a single mole of nature — he appeared, whether innocent or guilty, amply provisioned with common human flaws, cast by his gifts and ambition into most uncommon relief. Yet this man, who spent so many years trying to avoid imputations of homosexuality, won devoted loyalty from both his wives. “I saw an emotional cripple take up his bed and walk,” someone remarked of his first marriage. For a while after the trial Thorpe seemed to nurse the dream of rebuilding his career.

In 1981 he applied unsuccessfully for the job of race relations adviser to the BBC, and the next year he was actually appointed director of Amnesty, only to resign the post after complaints from within the organisation. Thorpe with his wife, Marion, in 1999 (REX) Thorpe remained chairman of the political committee of the United Nations Association until 1985, but in the world of the haut monde that he loved to adorn there would be no redemption. By the middle of the 1980s, moreover, he was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. The North Devon Liberals, however, remained faithful to the last, electing him as their president in 1987. Jeremy Thorpe’s second wife died in March of this year; he is survived by his son, Rupert, from his first marriage.

Jeremy Thorpe, born April 29 1929, died December 4 2014 Jeremy Thorpe obituary | Politics | The Guardian Liberal Democrats Jeremy Thorpe obituary Charismatic leader of the Liberal party whose career was brought to an end by a murder conspiracy charge Jeremy Thorpe at the Liberal party assembly in Margate, Kent, in 1972. Photograph: PA Thursday 4 December 2014 12.32 EST Last modified on Tuesday 19 July 2016 10.18 EDT Share on Messenger Close Jeremy Thorpe, who has died at the age of 85, became the principal forgotten figure of modern British politics long ago. Even classic tragedy on the Oscar Wilde scale eluded him. The grubby circumstances of the scandal arising from the shooting of a dog called Rinka on Exmoor brought his political career to an end. It was scarcely the stuff of which great human dramas are made. His fall, however, could hardly have been more total.

Although acquitted of incitement and conspiracy to murder at the Old Bailey in June 1979, Thorpe by the time of his trial had already lost his seat in parliament and been forced to relinquish the leadership of the Liberal party. Thereafter, it suited his colleagues and successors to airbrush his role out of the party’s history – a job they performed so successfully that the sole public re minder of what had once been his national fame became his occasional and increasingly frail appearances at the grander sort of London memorial service. For a politician whose stock-in-trade had always been a flair for exhibitionism and showmanship, it was a particularly cruel form of punishment. From his undergraduate years at Oxford – where he was president, successively, of the Liberal Club, the Law Society and the Union – the young Thorpe had contrived to make a legend out of his life. Ominously, however, some held reservations about him even at the outset. None of his university contemporaries denied his extrovert gifts – he was a fine speaker and a superb mimic – but they tended to regard him with a certain wariness.

A faint whiff of sulphur, connected with ballot-rigging, clouded even his election to the presidency of the Oxford Union as long ago as 1951. But if Thorpe wore his ambition a little too openly on his sleeve, it was still a quixotic decision on his part to resolve to make the Liberal party the vehicle of it, never wavering in his faith. The choice – made at a particularly bleak era for Liberal fortunes – reflected all the greater credit on him since he had all the credentials for a more orthodox form of political ascent. An Old Etonian with an illustrious family lineage in Conservative MPs, he would have had little difficulty in making his way in the Tory party. The son of John Henry Thorpe and his wife, Ursula (nee Norton-Griffiths), Thorpe was born in Surrey into a political family. His father, a KC, was elected Tory MP for Rusholme in Manchester in 1919, and his maternal grandfather was Sir John “Empire Jack” Norton-Griffiths, another Tory MP. Another ancestor, Mr Speaker Thorpe, was beheaded by an irate mob in 1371.

Back from wartime evacuation in the US in 1943, the young Jeremy lived in some comfort in Egerton Gardens, Chelsea, London, against an agreeably rich and privileged background. At Eton his greatest interest lay in music, and he was a keen violinist. His political hero, whom he met as a small boy, was David Lloyd George, the last Liberal prime minister, whose daughter, Megan, was his godmother. At home there were the first signs of his famous wit and gift for practical jokes; he recalled pretending with Megan to be ghosts, and so breaking up a particularly stuffy dinner party. He left Trinity College, Oxford, with a third-class law degree, but his practice as a barrister never really blossomed. Beneath the foppish exterior, however – he always wore a waistcoat and a watch-chain – the spirit of a true radical was often trying to escape. Nor was he content simply with student politics. As an undergraduate and a young barrister, Thorpe organised trips by what were known as university commandos to the West Country, then possibly the sole potential growth area for the Liberal party.

His reward lay in being selected as the parliamentary candidate for the constituency of North Devon in 1952. He contested the seat for the first time in the 1955 general election, when he halved the majority of the sitting Conservative MP, though failed to win it. On the stump, Thorpe was a phenomenon, to the despair of his Tory and Labour opponents. Invariably sporting a brown derby hat (a habit borrowed from the 1920s American Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith), he ruthlessly exploited his gift for taking off voices, causing endless delight by replying to questions at public meetings in exactly the same Devon intonations as his interlocutor. He also developed a splendid line in mockery, relentlessly directed at the more feudal aspects of rural Conservatism. Thorpe always had a radical cast of mind. He was, he insisted, deeply opposed to privilege and used to talk about his shock at seeing his mother call up a servant from the basement of their house to take a few lumps of coal from the scuttle to put on the fire.

But he never allowed these feelings to interfere with his own enjoyment of a pleasant, well-to-do life, and he was generally happiest when defending the rights of those furthest away from Britain. He was a passionate believer in the right of African peoples to self-determination. The doubts were about what was called his “style” – the hats, the elegant parties, the hobnobbing with royalty, the endless streams of anecdotes about his famous friends. Thorpe was never really interested in ideas and policies, though he was fascinated by people and the interplay of social life. He was, colleagues sometimes felt, far more interested in the past; more likely to consult the shades of Gladstone or Asquith than the present reality. Four years after his unsuccessful assault on North Devon, he fought again and won, if by a hair’s breadth margin of 362 votes, quitting the bar the following year. His victory in 1959 meant that he was a member of the House of Commons by the time he was 30 – in a party which had hardly seen a young Liberal since he was born.

Yet even he could barely have anticipated that he would become leader of the party – admittedly then consisting of only 12 MPs – at the age of 37. Jo Grimond ’s abrupt retirement in January 1967, however, posed the party a problem. There was no obvious heir apparent and, after an agonising first ballot (in which Thorpe received six votes and his two opponents three each), he was chosen unanimously as Grimond’s successor. It was not much of an inheritance. Harold Wilson ’s landslide victory at the 1966 general election meant that any talk of a Lib-Lab pact was off the agenda, and all Thorpe could do was to hunker down and hope for better times. He remained a continuous and dazzling comic turn. Wilson would invite him to dinners at No 10, purely in order to hear his devastating impersonations of Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan.

He had caused permanent damage to the latter’s reputation in responding to the dismissal of seven cabinet ministers in the 1962 Night of the Long Knives with an adaptation of the words of St John: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.” Thorpe’s idea of heaven was a reception or dinner, attended by the great and good, where his coruscating wit could be appreciated by the most powerful in the land, or, preferably, the most powerful in Europe or the world. One of his favourite tales was of how he had rung Lady Pamela Berry, pretending to be Macmillan. After talking to her for a while, he “called” Lord (Bob) Boothby and Michael Foot to the phone. Berry was delighted and thrilled by this phone call. Later Thorpe rang back in his real voice and told her the truth. He would tell this story with great pleasure, repeating the voices again for the benefit of each new set of listeners. In 1968 he married Caroline Allpass, who worked at Sotheby’s. He proposed to her, with typical Thorpe bravura, on top of the Post Office tower. The next year they had a son, Rupert.

But by 1970, better times certainly did not materialise at that year’s general election, when the anti-Wilson backlash, giving the Tories a comfortable overall majority, reduced the Liberals to a bare half a dozen MPs. And within four days of the poll, Thorpe suffered a devasting blow with the death of Caroline in a car crash. It was, paradoxically, at this low moment of his personal and political fortunes that the new Liberal leader first began to capture public sympathy. His wife’s death shocked the country. The plight of a public man, still only 41, left with a son not yet two years old, touched a chord that went well beyond the narrow frontiers of party allegiance. Thorpe’s performance at the time was a model of composure and courage, all the more impressive as he was by then under growing strain over rumours about his private life. For a while, he seemed to go to pieces, though he finally pulled himself together and in 1973 married Marion, Lady Harewood. The divorced wife of the Earl of Harewood, she was a concert pianist and friend of Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, whose publisher her father Erwin Stein had been.

The couple were brought together by the pianist Moura Lympany . This was a different kind of marriage; less passionate, but founded on a close, even intense, commonality of interest. Whatever the truth of the former model Norman Scott’s accusations of a homosexual relationship with him, allegedly going back to 1961, the threat of blackmail had already surfaced and, foolishly, payments to stave off a public scandal had been made. It says much for Thorpe’s stamina and resilience that, even under this personal pressure, he was able to start rebuilding the Liberal party in the effective way that he did. From 1972 onwards the Liberals notched up a succession of dramatic byelection victories, winning five seats within a single year – the penultimate one at Ripon, North Yorkshire, almost certainly owing something to Thorpe’s marriage to Marion, a member by marriage of the local aristocracy. When he led his party into the general election of February 1974, prompted by the miners’ strike, Thorpe thus had some reason to feel optimistic. The result – a total of more than 6m Liberal votes (if yielding a mere 14 parliamentary seats) – probably exceeded his own expectations.

It was very much a personal triumph. The Liberal campaign throughout bore his own distinctive, showman’s hallmark – and it was only when the votes were safely in that Thorpe conceivably made a blunder. His eagerness to negotiate with Edward Heath over maintaining the then Conservative government in power dismayed his own party and he was soon forced to back down (thereby sacrificing the only chance he ever had of holding cabinet office). Perhaps because memories of that incident lingered, the second election, in October 1974, proved an anti-climax for the Liberal party. Its aggregate poll went down by 700,000 and its representation in the Commons was also reduced, if only by a single seat. After the October 1974 election, Thorpe became the third of the party leaders (following Heath and Wilson) to ride into the sunset, formally resigning the Liberal leadership in May 1976. His remaining three years in the Commons, until his defeat at North Devon in 1979, were poignant and painful ones, both for him and his colleagues.

He had to live each day under the shadow of rumour and innuendo, and eventually (though not until 1978) under the direct threat of criminal charges arising from allegations that he had sought to silence Scott: a gunman, Andrew Newton, was hired to meet Scott in 1975, but the only resulting casualty was Scott’s great dane. The last time he displayed his old zest and exuberance publicly was when, on hearing the news of his acquittal, he exultantly threw three cushions into the air and out of the dock at the Old Bailey on 22 June 1979. Thorpe’s strengths were his vigour, his popularity with the public, his ability to convey important political opinions and facts in language to which the electorate could respond. His familiarity on the TV screen, his imposing presence in the TV studio, his ability to switch from being the masterful clown to the serious statesman, all helped to give the Liberal party – poised perpetually on the brink of extinction – a credibility that it would otherwise have lacked. His main faults were vanity and arrogance.

Thorpe never saw why he should make political friends, and never felt the need to build up the reserves of loyalty that any political leader needs. In the Liberal party he had no jobs, no patronage to offer, and he too often fell into the trap of being rude to those whose help he would later need. One MP who had pondered running for the party leadership recalled that Thorpe had threatened to destroy him – an absurd boast. When, in 1976, he did need the support of his colleagues, he looked around and found none. He loved the excitement and the glitter of his post, but could never really accept the hours of drudgery and tedium that the job of Liberal leader involved. He could have been one of the greatest postwar politicians, and for his failure he must in the end have blamed only himself. Marion died in March this year . He is survived by Rupert, a photographer. Anthony Howard David Steel writes: The true tragedy of Jeremy Thorpe’s life was that today nobody would care less if indeed he had had, as a young bachelor, a homosexual relationship with Norman Scott.

We have many gay MPs and cabinet ministers, but of course we are talking of pre-1967 days when homosexual acts were still a criminal offence. Jeremy’s main fault was his unfortunate choice of friends – notably Peter Bessell MP, who jointly and foolishly entered into the long-running payoff drama with Scott which was his undoing. It is indeed sad that this course of events came to dominate his life. I, for one, will always be grateful for his campaigning zest, especially during my byelection in 1965. His genuine sympathy for underprivileged people – whether in his beloved North Devon or in Africa – should not be obscured. His suggestion that the Ian Smith rebellion in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) should be brought to an end by cutting the railway line from South Africa was eminently sensible, but he was ridiculed by the Tories and their press allies as “bomber Thorpe”. People such as Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia regarded him as a true ally and friend. The second tragedy to strike Jeremy was the death of his wife Caroline. John Pardoe and I were with him in his room in the Commons when the police officer came to tell him of the terrible accident.

I had to go round to his flat to tell the nanny, who was busy feeding baby Rupert a boiled egg in his high chair. It was a scene I will never forget. Jeremy’s return to the Commons after that coincided with the death of the new chancellor, Iain Macleod. His gift for appropriate oratory showed through: “One of the supreme qualities of the House of Commons is that when misfortune strikes a colleague, the house, individually and collectively, reacts as a family, and its kindness, its understanding and its readiness to share in sorrows is something which is deeply comforting, and for which I myself have cause to be moved and grateful. It is my fervent hope that Eve Macleod will be similarly sustained and helped by the feelings of the House as she faces the agony of separation.” The truth about what happened after Jeremy’s acquittal is complicated. Some members of the party’s executive committee were keen to pursue him for the return of at least £10,000 which the trial had revealed he had taken from a generous election donation in order to pay for dealing with Scott. I told them we had had quite enough devastatingly bad publicity: party members had stopped canvassing because of ribaldry on the doorsteps.

Agreement was reached not to pursue this, provided that I, in turn, promised that Thorpe would play no further part in the public life of the party. The third tragedy to hit him was the onset of Parkinson’s disease, which limited his physical enjoyment of life in his last years. Jeremy was always fun to be with and his mind remained as sharp as ever, though it became difficult to hear what he was saying. Throughout the years he was fortunate to enjoy the love and devotion of his second wife, Marion.• John Jeremy Thorpe, politician, born 29 April 1929; died 4 December 2014 Scandal of 1970s, rooted in days of illegal homosexuality, brought murder charge and suspicion of establishment cover-up Published: 4 Dec 2014 Jeremy Thorpe, former Liberal party leader, dies aged 85 | UK news | The Guardian UK news Jeremy Thorpe, former Liberal party leader, dies aged 85 Thorpe took Liberals to brink of coalition government but resigned as party leader in 1976 after being accused of conspiracy to murder Jeremy Thorpe in February 1970 when he was Liberal party leader and MP for North Devon.

Photograph: Getty Thursday 4 December 2014 11.05 EST Last modified on Tuesday 19 July 2016 10.18 EDT Close This article is 2 years old Jeremy Thorpe, who brought the Liberal party to the brink of coalition government in 1974 but resigned amid scandal soon after, has died aged 85. He died on Thursday morning after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, his son Rupert has announced. From the age of 38, he led the Liberals for nine years. Between 1967 and 1976, surviving a poor performance in the 1970 general election, he turned the Liberals from a tiny party of six MPs into a small one of 11. In the 1974 general election, Thorpe played up his relative youthfulness by vaulting a security barrier wearing his trademark trilby. The Liberals made a breakthrough, winning 19% of the vote (then a post-war record) and got 14 MPs. Although Ted Heath had not won a majority, he had won the popular vote and refused to resign.

Thorpe went to Downing Street for secret coalition talks with Heath ( at one point being smuggled into No 10 ). The talks eventually collapsed as the Liberals couldn’t stomach coalition with the Tories and feared being tainted by Heath, whom even the Spectator was calling a “squatter” in No 10. It was the the closest to actual government the third party had come for decades , with the failure of the talks leading to a minority Labour government led by Harold Wilson . Two years after walking up Downing Street, Thorpe resigned as leader of the party after being accused of conspiracy to murder a former model, Norman Scott, who claimed to be a former lover. Scott had been out walking his great Dane, Rinka, and, though he survived, the animal was killed. Thorpe was acquitted on all charges in 1979, but had by then had lost his seat and his party . According to Wikipedia, “Not long after the end of the trial Thorpe was found to have Parkinson’s disease and retired from public life. For many years, the disease has been at an advanced stage.

In 1997 he visited the Liberal Democrat party conference and was given a standing ovation by party members, and he attended the funeral of Roy Jenkins in 2003. “In 1999, Thorpe published his memoirs, In My Own Time, in which he described key episodes in his political life. He did not, however, shed any further light on the Norman Scott affair.” He told the Guardian in 2008 : “If it happened now I think ... the public would be kinder. Back then they were very troubled by it. It offended their set of values.” Harold Wilson thought the allegations a Conservative smear, asking in a memo to one of his ministers, Barbara Castle, why damaging details surfaced later in the 1970s at a time when Labour might want to go into coalition with the Liberals, rather than earlier when Heath wanted them. He said in 2008 that it was more likely to have been his opposition to apartheid that brought about the trouble: “South Africa certainly attempted to smear me. They made life very difficult. I wanted to clear the air, but I was pretty shattered. I would have gone on leading the Liberal Democrats .

I think I could have pushed up our number of seats.” Matthew Parris, Tory MP turned broadcaster, described the episode as the “most sensational [scandal] of the parliamentary century, bar the Profumo scandal”. Thorpe’s father and maternal grandfather were Conservative MPs, but he became a Liberal because of international blunders by the Tories (he cites Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and later the party’s Suez “adventure”). Thorpe was married to interior decorator Caroline Allpass. Their son Rupert was born in 1969. Caroline Thorpe was killed in a car crash in June 1970. Thorpe married Marion Stein in 1973. A distinguished concert pianist, she died in 2014.

The Liberal Democrats tweeted the news that the former Liberal leader had died, adding: “Our thoughts are with his family.” Lord Steel of Aikwood, who succeeded him as party leader, said: “He had a genuine sympathy for the underprivileged - whether in his beloved North Devon where his first campaign was for “mains, drains and a little bit of light” or in Africa, where he was a resolute fighter against apartheid and became a respected friend of people like President Kaunda of Zambia.” Nick Clegg, who attended Thorpe’s 80th birthday party in 2008, paid tribute to the former Liberal leader. “Jeremy Thorpe’s leadership and resolve were the driving force that continued the Liberal revival that began under Jo Grimond,” he said. “Jeremy oversaw some of the party’s most famous by-election victories and his involvement with the anti-apartheid movement and the campaign for Britain’s membership of the common market were ahead of his time.

“My thoughts are with Jeremy’s family and friends as they try and come to terms with their loss.” Sir Menzies Campbell, the former Lib Dem leader, said: “Jeremy Thorpe’s enforced resignation as leader of the Liberal party and his subsequent departure from parliament should not obscure the fact that in his day he was an outstanding parliamentarian with a coruscating wit, and a brilliant campaigner on the stump whose interest and warmth made him a firm favourite with the public.” • This article was amended on 5 December 2014 to attribute two paragraphs to Wikipedia. Scandal of 1970s, rooted in days of illegal homosexuality, brought murder charge and suspicion of establishment cover-up Published: 4 Dec 2014 Charismatic leader of the Liberal party whose career was brought to an end by a murder conspiracy charge Published: 4 Dec 2014

Question: Who did Jeremy Thorpe replace as leader of the Liberal Party?
Answer: JO GRIMMOND